Amy Bilden’s work is informed by yoga, dance and avoiding trips to the art supply store

By Joel Lang

Updated
12:00 am EST, Sunday, December 9, 2018

Amy Bilden’s artwork favors organic forms.

Amy Bilden’s artwork favors organic forms.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Amy Bilden’s artwork favors organic forms.

Amy Bilden’s artwork favors organic forms.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Amy Bilden’s work is informed by yoga, dance and avoiding trips to the art supply store

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“I love embracing the past, but also changing it a little,” Amy Bilden says, in an artistic understatement.

There is plenty of evidence in her studio at St. Philip Artists’ Guild in Norwalk that she changes it a lot. From a bookcase, she removes a lady’s purse, the old-fashioned kind made of fabric like a tiny satchel. She opens it and removes an equally old pair of dark nylon stockings.

The purse and the stockings both belonged to her grandmother, who lived in the tiny North Dakota town of Northwood (pop. 900) where Bilden spent the first eight years of her life and saw people could make whatever they needed to make.

Suspended nearby is the abstract sculpture Bilden made in homage to her grandmother, using nylons and concrete. An array of nearly identical, drooping pieces, it suggests a queen’s breast plate adorned with cream-colored stones. Bilden says the sculpture’s pendulous shapes reminds some people of body parts, though opinion is divided on whether they are masculine or feminine.

“I just like the organic forms. They are like tear drops,” she says. “It’s really intimate. You have this really strong material juxtaposed with the softness of nylons and yet they are able to contain it. The creation of this piece was physical process. It was very intense. It was almost like a performance piece or a dance.”

Bilden, who also has a dance background, would lug bags of concrete from Home Depot up to her second-floor studio where she would mix it, pour it into cups fitted with stockings and then whip the stockings.

“I’d throw them like this,” she says, raising her arms over her head, then swinging them down in a flaying motion. “The momentum carried the concrete into the toe of the nylon. The force would create the tear drop shape. Then I would hang them on the wall to dry and it would seep and take on this kind of batik look.”

The sculpture was one of the pieces Bilden exhibited in the Silvermine Guild of Artists new members show in 2011. A few years later, in an exhibit that was a reward for winning a Connecticut Arts Fellowship grant, she almost literally dug up the past for a piece titled “Mending Broken Limbs.”

It was a cascade of sun-bleached animal bones and sticks sanded to look like bones, topped with old papers rolled to look like roses. Another piece was a grid of 50 faintly colored mixed-media paintings, each slightly different, also bearing rose images, that corresponded with her grandmother’s final days.

In artist statements, Bilden has written that her work is about identity, gender norms and domesticity, its constant tasks and common materials. As different as one of her pieces may be from another, almost all involve repetitive work. Some early drawings began with thousands of tiny circles. “It was almost like meditation,” she says. A series of yarn sculptures began because, she says, “I just kept going” once she started knitting. Displayed rolled up, they are not recognizable as scarfs that grew and grew.

Bilden likened them to tree rings and gave them timeline titles. She has created a separate portfolio category called “Time” for pieces she considers otherwise unthemed. Most are mixed-media paintings united, she says, by “the time spent making; the time involved to be an artist.”

Now 36, Bilden followed an unlikely route to become a Connecticut artist. Her father’s family owns what remains the oldest pharmacy in North Dakota. When her parents, both teachers, moved to Miles City, Mont. (pop. 8,000), Bilden thought she’d arrived in a metropolis. She soon realized it was “legit cowboy country” in the old badlands territory.

In high school, she somehow started doing yoga on her own, watching a Rodney Yee tape. In college at the University of Montana, she concentrated on art and dance. Then in 2006 she went to India on a three-month artist’s fellowship. “I wanted to try something completely different, and that was the most difference you could get,” she says.

It was there she did knitted sculpture and also learned to color her drawings with tubes of henna dye. She briefly returned home before coming to Connecticut, sight unseen, to take a job as a nanny that quickly became live-in position. She did her concrete nylons while still there, but soon after began teaching art at the Whitby School in Greenwich.

In November, Bilden was in conversation with curators from the New Canaan Library about an upcoming exhibition. Her ideas to include some element of group participation were being influenced by her teaching.

“As a teacher, I like giving people the opportunity to create themselves and reconsider what they’re capable of,” she says. “I think we’ve almost gotten too isolated like, ‘These are artists, they do art.’ It’s compartmentalized. I think creating is a natural process.”

On a table in her studio, Bilden was experimenting with various forms of cut paper that might be a flame, a hand or a leaf. Cut paper pieces comprise another part of her portfolio, as do sculptures made from paper. Often the original paper she uses is not so much recycled as repurposed.

One of her earliest pieces included prescription forms dating to the early 1900s pulled from the basement of the Bilden Pharmacy in Northwood, N.D. The rose flowers in “Mending Broken Limbs” were made from old phone directories, geologic survey maps and newspapers.

Besides the role of artist, Bilden also was thinking about the materials an artist uses.

“I don’t want to purchase anything,” she says. “There’s questioning about what an artist needs to fill the world with. I’m definitely interested in using what already exists, but having a transformational quality about it.”